


Binary Logic

by foolish_mortal



Category: National Treasure Series
Genre: Community: smallfandomfest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 10:26:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolish_mortal/pseuds/foolish_mortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Riley's entire life had been a partition of good and bad lists. Computers: good. Getting stuffed into lockers: bad. But then Ben had come along and stayed in a weird grey area that made Riley's head hurt. Intelligent: good. Totally crazy: bad, but maybe good too. Near-death experiences: really bad, but also weirdly addicting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Binary Logic

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: the find of a lifetime.

According to the story Riley always told when he was drunk, he’d always wanted to get into dot com America because it was the thing to do, and all his friends who had already landed a job seemed industrious and respectable and well, maybe not exactly _happy_ but happy to do the function they had worked their asses off for in college. And he’d wanted it too until he’d really been hired and discovered it was all long blocks of goto code and short lunch breaks and matchbox cubicles. Then he'd figured out his friends had just wanted someone else to be miserable with them.

So he preferred to work from home now on his own terms, picking the projects he wanted and interfacing with clients through email or maybe the occasional phone call. He had an honest to god office in the back with all of his servers and files and old textbooks he’d never bothered to throw away.

Ben liked it. The wood flooring and pale French doors were organic and calming. He brought his books and studied there sometimes because it was always weirdly quiet except for the tap-tapping of the keyboard and the hum of machines. 

Ben knocked once and then opened the door. “Riley.”

Riley looked up from over his computer screen and then went back to typing. “Hey, Ben, what’s up?”

In the middle of his efficient whitewashed office, he looked far from professional in his boxers and ratty Power Rangers t-shirt, but Ben supposed that was the beauty of being a freelancer.  He leaned over Riley’s shoulder. The computer screen had multiple windows panelled across it. “What are you working on?”

“Nothing,” Riley said and minimized one of the screens. “Just doing some web security stuff for a startup and working on my new book, which,” he added as Ben opened his mouth. “ _You’re_ not allowed to look at yet.”

“Come on, Abigail’s seen it.”

Riley stopped typing and frowned. “Well yeah, but I don’t _care_ if Abigail sees it.”

“I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted,” Ben murmured. He pointed to one of the windows. “Is that one of those animated photo galleries? Those are cool.”

“Y-eah,” Riley drawled and pushed his chair back. “So, what do you want?”

Ben tried to look innocent. “What do you mean?”

Riley crossed his arms. “Usually you just let yourself in, help yourself to the snacks in my pantry, and sit quietly over there.” He pointed to the chair next to the bookshelf. “Doing…whatever. But today it’s knocking on my door and,” he made his voice deeper, “Hey, Riley, I’m so interested in the work you’re doing- is that a photo gallery?” He jabbed a finger at Ben. “So what’s up?”

Ben handed over the folder he had been hiding behind his back. “Sadusky though we would find these interesting.”

“He thought _you_ would find it interesting,” Riley argued but opened the folder anyway. He made an interested sound. “I see…squiggle squiggle, a hat, and the eye of Sauron.” He handed the folder back to Ben. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Have you ever heard of the treasure of the Llanganatis?” Ben asked.

“No. Oh no, no _no_ ,” Riley moaned. “Inca general, Spanish torture? It’s definitely a trap. Why are ancient people so good at building temples of doom?”

“Come on, Riley,” Ben said. “Have I ever let you down before?”

“What kind of a loaded question is that?” Riley demanded. “Besides, we just got back from Cibola a couple of months ago.”

Ben tried not to shake him. “But I mean, aren’t you excited?”

“Uh, yeah. I’m excited I finally have another chapter of my book done." Riley spread out his arms. "I’m excited I’ve spent almost a full year living in one place, which hasn’t happened in oh, forever. I’m excited they didn’t run out of Lucky Charms before I got to the convenience store yesterday.”

Ben sighed. “I thought it would be easier with you.”

“Easier with me?” Riley repeated. “You mean easier than talking your dad and Abigail into going with you?”

“Yes." Ben stopped. "No. It’s not just that- I thought you’d understand.”

“Why? Because I keep volunteering for your crazy treasure hunting team?”

“Because you’re… _Riley_.” For a few minutes, Ben just stood there looking away and not knowing how to go on, and Riley stared at his keyboard like he would burn a hole in it.

“I’ll see what I can get out of those photocopies,” Riley said slowly. “Maybe it’ll tell us where the spooky ancient death traps are.”

Ben’s head jerked up. “Really?”

“Someone’s got to keep you from getting killed,” Riley said, but he didn't look happy.

Ben put a hand over his heart. “I promise I won’t get myself killed.”

“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time.” Riley snorted. “You know, I think I get why it isn’t easier with Abigail and your family. I wish it weren’t easier with me.” He lifted his glasses to rub his eyes, and Ben noticed for the first time that he looked tired.

Ben felt guilty for being relieved Riley was coming along. Riley had been there from the very beginning when Ben had been completely geek-out Knights of the Templar nuts around him, and Riley’d somehow been okay with it, which had been (and still was) comforting and completely bewildering. It would have felt wrong to go on an expedition without him now. But Ben didn’t really know how to put that into words without it coming out weird.

“See you tomorrow,” he said. “And thanks.”

“Yeah,” Riley echoed. “Tomorrow. Hey, remember to lock the door when you leave.”

“Right.” And then he turned around, because he couldn’t just leave it like _this._ “Oh, when we get back, you think we could make those slideshow picture galleries for our website?”

“Pssh,” Riley replied, but he was smirking. “Get out of here.”

Ben grinned back, and they were good.

 

For all Ben knew, the techobabble spouting from Riley’s mouth was Greek, except Ben could speak Greek fluently and still wasn't any closer to understanding him. Whatever Riley did got them where they needed to be, so it was enough, and Ben didn’t ask questions. Riley felt similarly about Ben’s whole history shtick—really, it was Abigail who Ben should have geeked out with whenever there was some kind of ‘boring dead guy doing something somewhere, blah blah _Ben,_ it’s _eleven_ in the morning!’ (Like all good geeks, Riley was mostly nocturnal.)

But Ben still called him at all sorts of weird hours to talk out whatever he’d found that day because he didn’t need a voice to answer back, just a place to talk at through the phone. Riley was pretty sure he could have hung up, and Ben wouldn’t have known the difference.

But Riley never hung up. He just lay there in bed with the phone glued up against his ear and listened to the sounds of Ben’s voice without listening to the actual words. Because yeah, it sort of bothered him that Ben knew all this stuff that was completely foreign in the worlds of technology and coding, but Riley had always had a bit of a competitive streak. (He still didn’t know why he’d written that stupid conspiracy theory book, because it certainly hadn’t been to impress Ben, not at all.)

So he hung around in the hopes that one day he’d get the better of Ben, recalling that other time (now deified in his memory as The Daylight Savings Moment) when he’d made Ben pull the same blank stupefied face that Riley had probably been wearing ever since Ben sauntered into his cubicle and showed him the Silence Dogood letters and books marked with clues from the Knights of the Templar and his grandfather’s stories about the secrets of Charlotte and the Freemason conspiracy theories and oh God—even after they’d found all that damn treasure, Riley sometimes still thought Ben was completely nuts.

But Riley had believed in him, because back then he hadn’t had anything to believe in for a long time. He'd believed in Ben enough to follow him all the way to the Arctic Circle, to France, to London, to the fucking creepy catacombs under Trinity Church and the teeter-totters of death in Cibola. It was enough for him to question his own sanity in the past course of events, and it was so totally Ben’s fault, all of it.

 

Abigail always found it frustrating to work in the Gates library, no matter that Patrick had one of the most beautiful collections of post-colonial books she had ever seen. “Ben, could you pass me that document over there?”

“Mm,” Ben replied, not looking up from his book.

She tried again. “Riley, there’s a folder on the counter next to you. I was wondering if you would—"

“Hng,” Riley replied, intent on his computer simulation.

Abigail sighed, put her glass of wine aside, and finally got up to get it herself. Men.

She sat back down with her translation. She thought she was really getting somewhere. It helped being surrounded by a house full of history geeks and Riley Poole, who was always happy to run a character by character comparison analysis to show off the software he was writing. (“Better running time than most professional programs,” he boasted and Ben dutifully waxed lyrical over the query time.)

“Dinner!” Emily shouted up the stairs. “Anybody alive up there?”

Abigail shut her book and marked her translation where she’d stopped. “Guys? Dinner?” They didn’t answer. Her stomach growled. “Ben? Hey, Riley.”

“Ben!” Riley shouted.

“What?” Ben said and looked up from his book.

“Look, my data simulation says you’re wrong.”

She sighed. So much for that. Ben shut his book and went to look at Riley’s computer. She followed, figuring she might as well get a show out of this.

“What do you mean, wrong? It can’t be wrong. All the books say he threw the treasure in the lake, which is now a sedimentary basin—"

She rolled her eyes. Ben still got stupid and superior about his random obsessions, like being right when no one had believed him made him right about everything now. There were times she thought she had been more comfortable when she had sat in the big scary office chair, and Ben and Riley had been the hapless nobodys who had tried to play it off like they weren’t looking for buried treasure like Indiana Jones.

“Nope! Nope! I’m right, you’re wrong!” Riley shouted back. His fingers were still typing, and sometimes she thought Riley's hands were completely separate entities.

“Oh come on.” Ben scooted closer to the screen. “You’re saying we have to go _under_ the mountain?”

Riley folded his hands behind his head and looked very smug. “Can’t argue with data, Ben.”

“Maybe you wrote the simulation wrong.”

“Wrong?” Riley snorted. “The simulation can’t be wrong. Who do you think you’re talking to? Do I see a computer science master’s degree hanging on your wall?”

Alright, maybe they hadn’t changed that much. Maybe she had changed instead. God help her, she thought they were actually cute now.

“Uh, mechanical engineering. MIT,” Ben said, pointing at himself.

“Caltech,” Riley shot back and a little grin appeared on his face. “You know what this means, right?”

She groaned and downed her glass of wine. “If you guys start another prank war, I’m officially done here.”

“But it’s tradition,” Ben said with his most winning smile.

“Uh huh,” she said, unimpressed. “I’m making it clear right now that I’m not driving anyone to the hospital.”

She left them to go downstairs and eat, computer simulations and college rivalries be damned, though she admitted later on that it was fun to hear about Riley hacking Ben’s online biography to include pdfs from the Weekly World News in his bibliography and Ben changing the locks on Riley’s front door in retaliation. It was all just immature harmless pranks. (Okay, so Riley had slept on his porch the first night rather than swallow his pride and ask Ben for the new key to his front door, and she didn’t think Ben would ever figure out how to un-program the Thundercats tune his computer made when it booted up. Unfortunately for Riley, Ben thought it was awesome, and the prank had blown up in his face.)

But then they took it too far like they always did, and a few days later during the Gates family’s traditional Sunday breakfast, Riley barrelled into the house looking like he was about to cry. “Ben, oh God, did you delete all the files on my laptop?”

She almost choked on her scrambled eggs. Ben looked as shocked as she did. “What? No! No, of course not! I backed them all up. Why would you think that?”

Riley let out a sigh of relief and sat down right there in the middle of the kitchen floor with his face in his hands. "Oh man. Oh, you're gonna be the death of me, you know that?"

“What did you do, Ben?” Patrick demanded.

“Nothing, Dad. I…I was stupid.” Ben got up and went over to Riley, who was actually shaking a little. He put a hand on top of Riley’s head. “I was stupid. I’m sorry. I’m _sorry_. It was just supposed to be a stupid prank. Here.”

He motioned for her to get his bag and unzipped the front pocket to pull out a few hard drive cases. He handed them down, and Riley clutched at them like they were his only possessions. She realised he probably didn’t have much else outside his computer projects and simulations. From the look on Ben’s face, she was pretty sure he had just figured that out too.

Ben and Riley were very alike, she thought with a little jerk. Old books and history had been the only important thing to Ben for a long time, and even now she didn’t think he really understood people. He was just better at faking it than Riley, who was earnest and awkward and reminded her of a little brother. But Ben just went pell-mell into it (like always) thinking he could wing it and come out alright because it had worked that way for him before (typical). He was actually worse than Riley, because at least Riley had figured out a way to differentiate parts of his life whereas Ben still treated people like he treated his historical documents. He thought he could play the game without learning the rules and didn’t know when he came off looking like a jerk.

And wasn’t it just ridiculous that it had taken this stupid prank war for her to figure out why she and Ben got along wonderfully but had never managed to work out romantically, why they kept coming back together only to fly apart again. She had been so taken by his George Washington campaign buttons and tuxedo-champagne patter that it had taken a few months of living together for the glamour to wear off, and she'd realised he had no idea what the hell he was doing. He was just a kid really; still waiting with his books and his artefacts for his grandfather to come back and tell him another story.

That ingenuousness had been charming, could _still_ be so unbelievably charming, but romance was something too dangerous to play with, and they were adults who had to make tough adult decisions. She’d made hers, and dear naïve bewildered Ben hadn’t understood and had tried to get her back. She’d come back too, idiot that she was, because there was something so irresistibly magnetic about him, about all Gates men. It frightened her that she could look into Emily’s face and see herself with perfect clarity in forty years.

She didn’t want that, didn’t want Ben and her to turn out like Emily and Patrick. Didn’t want to wait forever for Ben to grow the hell up to have what Emily and Patrick had now. It had taken an enforced separation and time to think alone and _Connor_ for her to really start getting over him, and she saw that Emily in her own way had been trying to save her all along from making the same mistakes.

"What were you thinking?" Riley asked. She wanted to ask Ben the same thing. She could probably ask him that a hundred times and get a different answer, none of them the right one.

"I don't know," Ben replied, and that wasn't the right answer either, but it was close.

Riley made a little sound and pressed his face against the side of Ben’s jeans. He still had a death grip on the hard drives. “You’re so messed up.”

“Yeah,” Ben said tiredly, not so much patting Riley's hair now as slightly moving the tips of his fingers against it. He let out a short humourless cough that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I know.”

Riley snorted, and it sounded indistinct against the denim. “Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t.”

Riley nodded quietly, like this fixed everything; Riley had always seen things more black and white than the rest of them. Like to him, the entire world was made of binary code. “Best prank ever, though,” he admitted in a small voice.

Ben did laugh then and ruffled Riley’s hair. “If you say so, buddy.”

Funnily enough, she found herself agreeing.

 

Riley thought it would have been nice to have a nice quiet treasure hunt for once instead of racing a bunch of Ecuadorian mercenaries (Seriously? No, _seriously?)_  that were working for a private collector who was willing to pay a high sum to add the Llanganatis treasure in his collection. The collector, whose name Riley had promptly forgotten but started with an S and sounded Nordic, had approached Ben about the treasure first, but of course Ben had been high and noble and turned him down. It had perhaps never occurred to Ben to agree to the collector’s demands and then have Sadusky quietly arrange to arrest him in the end; it would have saved them a lot of running and getting shot at and hiding out in rundown cafes.

Unfortunately, with Abigail at a conference in Paris and out for this one, Riley had ended up being the human leverage they were using to get Ben to do their dirty work for them. 

“Find me my treasure,” Mr. Nordic had said to Ben, and suddenly there was something cold and hard under Riley's ear. “Or your little friend dies.”

“Don’t do it,” had been the first thing out of Riley's mouth with barely a thought for the gun. He supposed he was used to guns and sudden death by now, which was just something else to blame Ben for assuming they both survived this. And hell, he was becoming pretty jaded about that too.

 If it had been Abigail, Riley had thought it would have meant something. He had been sure “do as we say or the funny guy gets it” wouldn’t have the same emotional pull, but Ben had gone completely white and backed down.

And Riley had been surprised, oddly touched, and angry in precisely that order because he should have _been there_ with Ben going into Mount Doom instead of just sitting helpless in the control chair watching a cluster of small green dots shuffle around. It was enough to make him want to sabotage the equipment in one swift unstoppable move and deal with the huge scary guns later, but this was the only way he _could_ be there with Ben in some capacity.

So while Ben went with half the crew, Riley was held back inside Nordic Collector headquarters, where he was been press-ganged into service as their new techie. Riley had cracked Mr. Nordic’s security and totally humiliated the last guy, who had subsequently met with a little accident, and wasn’t that just encouraging?

It was slow arduous work getting into the mountain. By the time Ben’s group reached the inner circle, Riley was pretty sure Mr. Nordic and the rest of the goon squad behind him were on the verge of nodding off. He could have tried to make a run for it but wasn’t going to take his chances- Mr. Nordic definitely looked like one of those types that could fire a gun even in his sleep.

And then suddenly, the cluster of dots started disappearing.

Riley lunged for the controls. He knew radio was spotty where they were right now, but he had to try _something._ “Ben? Hey, Ben! Can you hear me?”

“Ril-” There was a loud rumbling drowning out everything else. “Ther-” Static. “-the mountain’s-” There was a loud painful thud like the radio had been dropped.

It felt like a shock had gone through Riley's body. “ _Ben!_ Oh god, Ben, say something!”

“Where are they?” Mr. Nordic snarled and hello, gun pointing at his head again.

Riley ignored it. “I don’t know, okay? Give me a second-”

And of course that was exactly when the main door blew open and a whole team of Equador’s finest trooped in with their guns which were, as Riley observed with satisfaction, at least twice as big and intimidating as Mr. Nordic’s. Most of the goon squad got this message too, and dropped their guns immediately.

“Took you long enough!” Riley shouted, and the leader gave him a careless little smile while strapping Mr. Nordic into a pair of handcuffs. One of the others came forward to peer at the multiple screens arranged in front of the control system.

“Where is your friend Mr. Gates?” he asked, and Riley recognised him as the tech guy he’d swapped coding cred with while he and Ben had been held for questioning by the Ecuadorian Armed Forces. He’d seemed like a pretty chill guy, despite the fact that most of their conversation had been interrogation, and Riley’s arm had been handcuffed to a chair at the time. But hey, no hard feelings.

“Ben,” Riley breathed and wheeled around to try and triangulate his position. He pulled out his tablet, which had been confiscated and shoved in a drawer, and pulled up the tentative map he’d extracted from his computer simulation weeks ago. He had been itching to integrate his map the second he had seen Mr. Nordic’s complex and ridiculously expensive tracking system, but Ben had been wary about showing one of their aces. Well, that was irrelevant now.

“If I can just overlay the map on top of this,” Riley muttered, half to himself and half to the Ecuador team’s tech guy. He hooked up the laptop and began typing furiously. “I can see if anything lines up. It’s a shot in the dark, but I think the map we generated should be sort of accurate. We used a lot of historical data and land formations and patterns from other uh, let’s say _experiences_ , which isn’t the best, but I mean-”

And then the map was a blue layer on top of the tracking system. Riley pinpointed the last position he’d seen the cluster of green dots, and it matched up roughly with where Ben and the goons had been going and where he had thought Ben was on the generated map. Okay, so while his map had a lot of straight passageways, Ben’s group had definitely been tending eastward- It wasn’t perfect, but it was passable.

The tech guy made an approving noise and checked his gun. “What now?”

“Storm the castle, rescue the princess,” Riley said with a lot more confidence than he felt.

 

The medics pulled Ben out of the wreckage on a stretcher, and Riley bullied his way onto the helicopter when they airlifted him out to the nearest hospital. He sat beside Ben and held his limp bruised hand as the EMTs worked on him, and Ben came around just as the helicopter was about to touch down at Hospital Metropolitano.

"Ri…" he started and squeezed Riley's hand briefly before his eyes fluttered shut again. There were bits of dust still caught in his eyelashes and a long ugly cut running from his hairline to the flat of his unshaven cheek.

Riley couldn't look away.  The EMT said something, but he just hmmed and nodded along, because he had just figured out a couple of things at once, and his brain was quietly segfaulting all over the place. There would have been no appropriate way to verbalize it, except maybe with a long string of swearing. Instead he just clung onto Ben's hand till his knuckles showed white.

The doctors at the hospital persuaded him to shower and put ice on the impressive bruise he'd acquired when a goon had knocked him out with the butt of his gun. Ben was still in surgery hours later, and Riley knew he was getting on the staff's nerves, just as he knew they were too polite to tell him to go away. He saved them the trouble and took a cab back to the dingy hotel where he and Ben had been living out of tiny suitcases for the past few days. He changed out of his grimy blood-streaked clothes into another set that smelled stale but clean.

It was dark by the time he got back, and the hospital had settled Ben into a spacious private room with its own television. Ben was awake now, and he gave Riley a tired smile that turned into a yawn and a wince. Riley knew he had cracked a rib and bruised a few more, but all in all Ben had been absurdly fortunate.

"You're all right," Ben said. "I didn't know if…I was afraid that you…"

 His speech was a little slurred, and Riley realised he was on morphine. There must have been injuries the EMTs hadn't told him about. Or maybe they had, and Riley's college Spanish classes just hadn't covered the words for 'your friend is fucked up.' Riley looked at Ben's chart at the end of the bed and saw that Ben had a severely sprained leg on top of his other injuries.

"I'm fine," Riley said and sat on the corner of the bed. He clamped his shaking hands around his knees to quiet them. "They found me useful, since they'd shot their other tech guy." Ben closed his eyes, and Riley realised it had been the wrong thing to say. "I'm fine," he repeated. "You're the guy that had a mountain fall on him. You're really lucky to be alive, you know that?"

"Yeah," Ben said and gave him a lopsided grin.  “Thanks for saving me.”

Riley was suddenly furious, and that was good. He could handle anger. "How long are we going to do this, Ben?"

Ben looked surprised. "What are you talking about?"

Riley desperately wanted to hit him for that, but Ben looked so small and pathetic with his hospital scrubs and IV drip, that Riley couldn't bear to. "Nothing," he snapped and glared at the floor. "Nothing at all. God, I hate you sometimes. The next time you decide to be Lara Croft, you're doing it alone."

He started when he felt Ben's hand close over his.

"You don't mean that," Ben said, and when Riley looked up, he saw that Ben actually looked scared. Riley had seen Ben stare down a loaded gun without even blinking. He'd jumped across collapsing bridges without even breaking a sweat, and Riley had thought then that nothing could ever scare him.

"Yes I do," Riley replied. His voice wavered, and he seized back on the anger. "Ben, yes I _do_. What you did back there was _stupid._ I have never been so scared in my entire life."

"I am so sorry," Ben said. He reached out to press a cool dry hand to Riley's face, and Riley tried not to lean into it. "I swear I tried to make them let you go."

"Moron, I'm talking about _you_ ," Riley snarled. "I thought you were _dead_."

"Riley," Ben breathed, and his fingers were in Riley's hair, but Ben didn't know what it had felt like to sit there and wait for the search teams to find him. Riley had thought his knees would give out when they had brought Ben out alive and whole.

"You can't 'Riley' me, not this time," he started, but Ben leaned forward a few crucial inches and pressed his mouth against Riley's eyelid.

It was like the elastic bands that were holding him together snapped. Riley sagged forward and his forehead thunked against Ben's. Ben's face was cold and clammy, and Riley realised it was an effort for him to sit upright. He adjusted the pillows around Ben's shoulders and eased him back against them.

"You need to watch your ribs, idiot," he grumbled. He was trying to breathe normally and doing a terrible job.

"Okay," Ben murmured and kissed the corner of his mouth. He smelled all wrong, like disinfectant and soap. "How long are we going to do this, Riley?" he murmured, shamelessly parroting back Riley's words, which was such a low trick. "Just kiss me already."

"You are so doped up," Riley retorted and kissed him back. Ben's mouth was familiar. His lips were dry and chapped, and Riley could taste the hospital's cheap mint toothpaste on them. "Don't think I've forgiven you, though."

"I’ll buy you those espresso shots you like,” Ben said, and his voice was low and intimate in Riley's ear, as if they were sharing secrets.

“Yeah, because they airlifted us to the Starbucks,” Riley said because sarcasm was good. Sarcasm was safe. His entire life had been a partition of good and bad lists. Computers: good. Getting stuffed into lockers: bad. But then Ben had come along and stayed in a weird grey area that made Riley's head hurt. Intelligent: good. Totally crazy: bad, but maybe good too. Near-death experiences: really bad, but also weirdly addicting.

Ben tried to laugh, and his whole body spasmed in pain.  And pain, pain was definitely bad. His grip on Riley's arm tightened. “Okay then, I’ll give you money to buy some yerba mate.”

A ringing sound interrupted whatever Riley was going to say next, and he realised after a few moments that it was Ben's phone. It was coming from the pocket of Ben's leather jacket, which was hanging on the hook beside the door. The distance seemed infinite now. "That must be the police," Riley said and tried to get up. "Probably about the Llanganatis treasure."

Ben's hands fisted in the back of Riley's shirt. "Screw the treasure," he said. "Stay."

"But," Riley started, but Ben gave him a look. "Okay," he finished instead and settled beside Ben on the tiny hospital bed. Ben curled an arm around his shoulders, and Riley tucked his head under Ben's chin. Together they listened to the phone ring out.


End file.
